HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Spying and doing fieldwork in the East
No full textThis article reflects on the anthropological scholarship of Katherine Verdery, especially her last book, My life as a spy, to explore the conditions of doing fieldwork and producing knowledge in the European East during the Cold War and onwards. In particular, I attend to the themes of secrecy, identity, surveillance, and power that are integral to fieldwork and anthropological practice more generally beyond the confines of Eastern Europe and that resonate in different contexts of authoritarianism and securitization
Can the umma replace the nation? Salafism, home-making and the territorial nation-state
No full textEngaging with contemporary literature on migration and home-making, in this article I examine Salafi concepts of home and its relationship to the idea of nation-state. I discuss how Salafism, a transnational Islamic proselytizing movement, strives to create the ideal home for believers by reorienting their belonging from the local and territorial to a deterritorialized and abstract space. Thereby Salafism bypasses, and indirectly challenges, the nation-state due to the inherent tension between the aspirations of the two. Presenting case studies from Cambodia and Lebanon I show how the Salafis’ strategy of home-making can differ depending on the local sociopolitical context, how the home-making process plays out in reality, and how the Muslim communities’ relationship to the nation-state in which they live and their attachment to the territory influences it
What was fascism?
No full textIn her influential monographs and essays, Katherine Verdery transformed understandings of state socialism and the command economy at its heart. I reflect here on how scholars might similarly reframe understandings of Italian fascism through renewed attention to the infrastructural project so central to fascist governance in both the metropole and overseas possessions. The piece operates in the spirit of Verdery’s critical questioning of Western accounts that overestimated the centralization of power within socialist states. By contrast, the prevailing scholarship on fascist political economy, as well as empire, has stressed its irrationality. A prominent view thus depicts fascist projects of public works and autarchy largely as future-oriented projections (delusions, even) of the Duce or as monuments to failure. By employing an ethnographic sensibility that takes seriously the logics of infrastructure and fascist infrastructural power, the analysis derives inspiration from Verdery’s method of challenging orthodoxies about power in particular state formations
“I feel like we skipped a social class”: The role of social class in the hijra of Dutch and Flemish Muslim women to Morocco
No full textThis article examines the role of social class in the hijra (Islamic migration) of Dutch and Flemish Muslim women (born and converted) to Morocco. Through an ethnography of their home-making practices, I argue that analyzing social class is crucial to understanding their migration and religious transformation. Unlike previous intersectional studies underexploring social class, I show how my interlocutors’ shifting socioeconomic status, informed by race, gender, and religion, significantly influenced their migratory experiences. This includes motivations for migration, perceptions of Moroccan society, and the (re)acquisition of white privilege. I argue that hijra, as a transformative religious act of mobility, both emerges from and reshapes their class status through underlying mechanisms of “coloniality.” By tracing their narratives and practices of furnishing and food, I highlight the importance of including social class in analyzing hijra and, more broadly, as a key element in intersectional approaches of migration and religious change
“Do not adjust your mind—there is a fault in reality”: Simulation games and development education
No full textFrom the late 1960s onwards simulation games were adopted by development education programs as an ethical and pedagogical tool to create awareness of the “true” nature of reality. This article explores both the limits and ongoing effects of simulation as a mode of structuring relationality and responsibility by looking at two moments in ethical history. The first is the vocal presence of youth at the Second World Food Congress in 1970; the second is a simulation game designed to encapsulate the mood of youth attending the conference, encapsulated by the slogan “do not adjust your mind—there is a fault in reality.” Using these moments to tether a broader discussion of simulation as a mode of ethical and pedagogical encounter, I argue for renewed anthropological attention to, and improvisation upon, educational tools that “multiply realities.
Tantsa: Intuition as authoritative know-how in the Roman Catholic Philippines
No full textThis article examines ritual nailing on the cross as a conduit for a process of ethical self-making among Roman Catholics in Pampanga, the Philippines. I emphasize the intersubjective and pedagogical components of this process by discussing the implementation of tantsa (literally, “to estimate”) as the intuitive capacity that facilitates ritual outcomes through the collaborative establishment of authoritative know-how. Aligning insight from feminist anthroplogy of the body with my own participant observation in Pampanga, I discuss tantsa through two distinct analytical corridors: (1) as a way of learning and intuiting another’s personhood, and (2) as an implementation of a tactile bodily technique that establishes the intercorporeal connectedness between two ritual protagonists
Performing piety in public: Ethnic politics and interreligious harmony in Indonesia
No full textIn this article, I focus on the reentry of Chinese Indonesians into both politics and public religious life in Indonesia in the post-Suharto era. I argue that while entry into local politics has led to new forms of interethnic and interreligious competition, public displays of piety and religiosity among Chinese religion practitioners resonate with the religiosity of others and comply with the need for religiosity outlined in Indonesian state ideology. Public Chinese religion has become an arena of social life in which systems of morality, based in different religious traditions, become a platform to create commensurability across ethnic and religious boundaries. Performances of religiosity on the part of Chinese Indonesian politicians can be seen as a pedagogical process of demonstrating the morally and socially appropriate behavior for Chinese Indonesian political leaders in the diverse, highly religious, and Muslim-majority Indonesian context
Ephemeral utopia: Aesthetics of the self and the community on the Syrian journey
No full textThis article examines the flux and reflux of commitment to jihad among immigrants to Syria. Contrary to a linear and often teleological view of commitment to jihad—radical individuals joining the most radical contemporary organization—migration to Syria involved much uncertainty, including both the circumstances for leaving and the phases that punctuated the migration. By studying this form of commitment to jihad through the double prism of its founding ideals and their historical outcomes, the successive and sometimes concurrent thematizations of jihad can be examined for those who attributed an existential meaning to it. Adopting a viewpoint based on the sociology of knowledge, we aim to show that commitment to jihad is a utopian surge, in Karl Mannheim’s sense of the expression, and a realization in the here and now of moral tendencies underlying the emigrants’ social ethos
Rereading Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande, fifty-five years later
No full textRereading Evans-Prichard’s classic fifty-five years later turned out to be a confusing experience. On the one hand, it confirmed the admiration I always had for the author’s clarity and the quality of his ethnography. On the other, there seemed to be a surprising contrast between his image of witchcraft and oracles working as an “explanatory system” that brought order in Zande society versus the emphasis on uncertainty and disorder in recent witchcraft studies. Evans-Pritchard’s views of the working of occult aggression fitted in with a major concern of anthropology of his time: showing, against Western prejudice, that other cultures had their own coherence and value. More recent studies rather concentrate on the resilience of these local ideas, and the ease with which they graft themselves onto modern changes